“Look!” she said. “It’s a supeero!” She could barely see the light high in the sky. She had to lean to the right, press her face against the wire of the cage, and look up through the window of the van. She was sure it was a supeero. She saw the flying man of light on TV. He was looking for her, she was sure. She hugged Mr. Elephant tighter.

The boy was younger than her. He was in the next cage. He was there when the men put her into her cage. He was crying at first but he had run out of cry. His eyes were wide and snot dripped from his nose into his mouth.

The van was noisy and kept hitting bumps.

“Don’t worry,” she told the boy. “Supeeroes always come. They are magic people. They help everyone and there is a happy ending on TV.” She knew this was true. Some supeeroes were cartoons and some were on the boring show that Mommy called “news,” but they were always there to save people in trouble.

Always.

*****

Light Man flew high above the freeway, his thoughts fractured and unhappy. He was supposed to be looking for the missing girl, but he kept flashing angrily on the comic book that Dennis had brought to the house. Plus the name. Light Man? Sounded like an ad for low calorie beer.

The signs over the freeway, the big electronic ones that usually told people how long it would take them to get to where they were going, all said AMBER ALERT GRN TOYOTA TRCL and gave a license plate number. Mireya told him that Amber was a girl from Texas who was abducted and murdered years ago. Now many states used her name in an alert system that gave the public information about a recent abduction.

His new costume wasn’t bad. Mireya’s mom was a very good seamstress. It was light blue and yellow, and even though it was less fancy than the Sun Man costume, it fit okay. He wore blue sneakers with it and some goggles that he found at a hole-in-the-wall store downtown.

Not that anyone could see his costume when his light was turned on, but he had to turn the light off sometimes.

“Never turn your light off when you’re in costume,” Tom had said. Mike didn’t have to listen to that, the society had kicked him out. He had to turn his light off so people could see him, and thank him for helping them. A hero needs public appreciation.

Mike would have ordered a costume from the Walters catalog if he had the money. Man, those were slick. Mireya found an old catalog for him to look through. Walters supplied both heroes and villains. They didn’t judge, they said. They even had an elaborate system of anonymous payment and dropping the costume in its package anywhere you want. Customers never gave their names and addresses. Walters’ motto was WE CAN’T REVEAL YOUR SECRET IDENTITY BECAUSE WE DON’T KNOW IT.

Then there was the comic book. As Mike was leafing through the catalog Dennis ran up to him with the thing in his hand. He pointed at the cover and said, “You!”

The comic was Sun Man #1. The picture was almost exactly the one he drew in his notebook on the way to L.A., but by a more professional artist. Could they have copied from his notebook? That was impossible. His notebook was stolen with his pack while he slept in a doorway.

The origin story inside was completely ridiculous. A homeless man encounters an ancient sun goddess in an alley and she gives him his powers. It had nothing to do with him. Except, and it had to be a coincidence, the man’s first name was Michael.

How many coincidences does it take to make something not a coincidence?

The publisher was Timely Comics, not some fly by night company. He had been reading their stuff since he was a kid.

Mike gave the comic back to Dennis. He didn’t think the kid could read, but Dennis seemed to enjoy looking at the pictures over and over again.

The Society must have sold the Sun Man rights to Timely. Mr. Bromgren said they owned the rights and they could use them without Mike. They had done it very fast too.

He would never find the girl by flying around over the sprawling city of Los Angeles. Mireya said she had faith in him. He found Knighthawk, she said. He could find one little girl in a city of millions. The abduction was the only topic on the news shows. Her mother, a pretty blond woman, was shown begging for the kidnappers to return little Bonnie. The same clip of her crying as she pleaded for her daughter’s return was played every few minutes on every channel.

Mike only found Knighthawk because the knight was in a room full of supervillains. He could sense people with superpowers. The dude in the black suit of armor did not have powers, but that warehouse full of villains drew Mike from miles away. He lied to Mireya about that. For some reason he didn’t want to tell her about that power. Maybe because it wasn’t very heroic. He told her he flew at super speed all over the city and found the knight that way. It was a better story.

Damn it, Mike was Sun Man. They may own the name but he WAS Sun Man.

Powers or not, Mike was pretty sure that Knighthawk character was a villain himself. Pink Poppy thought he was great, and kept telling the story about him rescuing her and Anthony from Faster and Buzz Kill. Something about him seemed wrong to Mike.

He could fly to the Society building and demand that Mr. Bromgren tell him the truth. That would be a better use of his time then looking for a girl he would never find. He really wanted to. Instead, he kept flying and pretending to look for little Bonnie.

*****

The van stopped. The men got out and she was alone with the boy for a while. He had stopped whimpering. She was trying not to start. She was scared, but she knew a supeero would save her. Maybe a whole bunch of supeeroes, like the Sushi Pack. They were cute, she would like it if they saved her.

A wall in front of the van opened. No, it was a huge door. The van dipped as one of the men sat down behind the wheel. He started the engine and the van rolled forward. She leaned to the side of the cage where she could see out of the window.

It was a huge room, with lots of boxes stacked up. Not boxes, cages just like she was in. There were kids in almost all of the cages. She was a pretty good counter, and there were more than she could count.

More men stood around, all holding big guns.

She squeezed Mr. Elephant and told him, “This is gonna take a lot of supeeroes.”

*****

“Mireya! Mireya!” a nine year old boy shouted as the Neighborhood Heroes exited the house. As usual on Sunday afternoon, a group of people were there to ask for help.

“One moment, mijo,” Mireya said. “Before we start. I want everyone to meet our newest member...” she turned and waved her hand at Mike. “...Light Man!”

Mike felt pretty good. He was getting used to the new costume. He could be Light Man. He stood in front of Mireya’s house and raised an arm. Pink Poppy was to his right, and Lodestone, on crutches, to his left. José didn’t usually come to the meetings, and Petaurista had called in sick.

“I thought he was Sun Man!” a teenager shouted.

Mike gritted his teeth. “No, I’m sorry,” he said, “Sun Man is different...”

The teenager swore and shouted, “Man, I brought his comic for an autograph! I paid three ninety five for it!” Mike could see the kid angrily shove his way through the crowd and get into an old car. The car started up and peeled away.

“Uh, all right,” Mireya said. “Come forward, don’t push, and tell us what you need.”

Soon Mireya left with the boy who shouted her name at the beginning. He wanted her to walk up the wall of an apartment building and retrieve his football. Some gang bangers took it from him and threw it on the roof.

A very old lady with iron gray hair, using a walker, came up to Mike. “What do you do, young man?” she asked.

“I Fly and I have super strength.”

“Very nice.”

“I’m sure I can help you,” Mike said.

Mike told Mireya another lie about their search for Bonnie. The news story was still hot a couple of days after the abduction. The police and experts interviewed on TV looked more and more glum, however. The chances of finding a child went down fast after forty eight hours, one of them said. Everyone had pictures in their heads of shallow graves and forlorn half eaten bodies washed up on beaches. These were the most likely images that would come with the final news about the hunt for Bonnie Pearson.

Mike told Mireya that she must have been moved out of L.A. “I think I would have found her if she was still here,” he told her.

“That’s all right,” Mireya said. “You did your best. Mike hadn’t done his best. He didn’t know where to start.

“The police will find her,” Mireya said. “We have people asking around the neighborhood too, but she’s from Westwood. That’s pretty far from here.”

Mike had learned enough about L.A. to know that Westwood was not that far in distance, but in money and social class it was very far.

“It’s about my husband,” the old woman said.

Mike brought his attention back to the woman. “You want me to bring him here? Rescue him? Find him?”

She grabbed his arm and squeezed gently. “Tell him I love him.” Then she turned the walker slowly and walked away.

“That’s Mrs. Steinmetz,” Anthony said, coming up next to Mike. He was in his Lodestone costume, though he was on crutches. Mike thought he looked stupid, but no one else said anything.

“She comes about once a month and asks us to visit her husband at Forest Lawn. She can’t drive any more.”

“You could take here there in one of your cars.”

“We’ve offered, but she thinks she’s in New York and Forest Lawn is thousands of miles away. She thinks all superheroes can fly, so we can go there in a few minutes.”

“So you don’t actually go.”

Anthony’s expression was invisible under his mask, but his voice made it clear that he was angry. “One of us drives up there every time she asks. We’re heroes. We do what we say we will.”

In the next half hour Mike talked to a man who wanted the heroes to find his dog, a teenaged girl who wanted them to get the medicine that her grandmother needed and the insurance company would no longer pay for, and a mother of two who wanted them to beat up her ex-husband so he would pay his alimony.

Mireya was back, and she put a hand on Mike’s shoulder as the mother of two walked away unhappy. “We can’t help most of them,” she said. “Sometimes they know that, they just want someone to talk to.”

“Excuse me,” a loud voice said. A distinguished looking man in an expensive suit approached Mike. He took a card out of his pocket and offered it. Mike took it. The man did not look like he belonged in this neighborhood.

Some of the crowd started to gather around a car that had pulled into the driveway. A black Maserati.

The man glanced back nervously at it. No, he did not belong here.

“Herbert Sloane,” the man said. “Kellerman, Sloane and Pritchard.” He had red patches on his face and the little veins on his nose were those of a more-than-social drinker.

“How can we help you, Mr. Sloane?” Mireya asked.

“I have a client whose daughter is missing,” Sloane said. “She insisted I come here and ask for your help.”

“Do you mean Bonnie Pearson’s mother?” Mireya asked. “Why would she send you here?”

Sloane blinked for a second, then said, “Oh, no no. This is a completely different case. The mother is from the Dominican Republic. It’s her little girl Maria. But more than that, the police think she killed the girl. They aren’t looking because they assume Maria is dead.”

“Why should we help someone who killed her own daughter?” Mike said.

Pink Poppy walked up behind Mireya. Lodestone thumped his crutches as he arrived next to Mike.

“She says she didn’t,” Herbert Sloane said. “My firm does pro-bono work and I am handling this case. My boss says to wrap it up, that Estela isn’t worth any more time. I shouldn’t believe her, but I do. She said you are the only ones who will help her.”

“We will try, Mr. Sloane,” Mireya said. “But this kind of work needs police and investigators more than superheroes.”

Sloane nodded. “You’re all she has left.”

“We already failed to find one girl,” Mike said loudly. I failed, he thought. “How can we find another one?”

People around them started to look up, then run. Mike didn’t notice at first, but then a shadow fell over him. He flashed his light on and flew out from under a round black thing that was descending onto the tiny lawn of Mireya’s house.

It was a flying car of some kind. The car settled onto the ground. Mike recognized the person who was operating it.

“Maybe I can help,” Knighthawk said.